Providing reliable high data rate services, e.g. real-time multimedia services, over wireless communication channels is a paramount goal in developing coding and modulation schemes. In wireless mobile communications, a channel that couples a transmitter to a receiver is often time-varying due to relative transmitter-receiver motion and multipath propagation. This time variation is commonly referred to as fading, and may severely impair performance of a wireless communication system. When a data rate for the system is high in relation to bandwidth, multipath propagation may become frequency-selective and cause intersymbol interference (ISI). Multipath fading in wireless communication channels causes performance degradation and constitutes the bottleneck for increasing data rates. In order to combat fading, techniques have been developed to exploit the available diversity.
As one example, space-time (ST) coding effectively combats fading while enhancing data rates by exploiting the presence of spatial diversity offered by multiple transmit and/or receive antennas which form a multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) communication system. ST coding relies on simultaneous coding across space and time to achieve diversity gain with high bandwidth efficiency. Two typical ST codes are ST trellis codes and ST block codes. In ST coding, the maximum achievable diversity advantage is equal to the number of transmit and receive antennas. Therefore, ST coding is constrained by the size and cost which a system can afford. As a result, exploitation of extra diversity dimensions, such as multipath diversity, is desirable.
Multipath diversity becomes available when frequency-selectivity is present, as is the typical case for broadband wireless channels. Multi-antenna transmissions over frequency-selective fading channels can provide a maximum diversity gain that is multiplicative in the number of transmit antennas, receive antennas, and the channel length. Space-frequency coding (SF) exploits multipath diversity by relying on simultaneous coding across space and frequency, i.e. combining an MIMO system with orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation. Due to the prohibitive complexity in constructing SF codes, previously existing ST codes have been adopted by replacing the time domain with the frequency domain. For example, existing ST block codes and trellis-coded modulation (TCM) codes have been adopted but do not result in maximum spatial and frequency diversity gain guarantees.
Space-time-frequency (STF) coding exploits the spatial, temporal, and frequency diversities available in MIMO-OFDM systems by coding the information-bearing symbols among antennas in time and frequency. Simple repetition codes can be used to achieve the maximum diversity gain available in frequency-selective MIMO channels at the expense of bandwidth efficiency.